Download PDF | We Have No King But Christ' Christian Political Thought In Greater Syria On The Eve Of The Arab Conquest (c. 400 - 585) Oxford University Press ( 2011)
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Acknowledgements
I have accumulated many debts while writing this book and the dissertations from which it grew. My thanks goes to the British Academy and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for providing me with the Post-doctoral Fellowship that allowed me to prepare my doctoral thesis for publication.
My supervisor, Averil Cameron, has been incredibly helpful and astute, encouraging me and pushing me into new fields of enquiry. My thanks also go to David Taylor, for his unflagging good humour, support and advice, and to James Howard-Johnston, who was my mentor for much for my M.Phil. and who allowed me to share the helm at his Further Subject on Justinian and Muhammad.
I should also like to thank Meredith Riedel, Greg Fisher, Dina Gusjenova, and Dan Mitchell, who discussed late Roman history with me and were excellent sounding boards for ideas, as well as conference audiences at Leiden, Princeton, and Kottayam, and at comparative history seminars in Oxford, to whom I presented work that would later be incorporated into the book. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dave Michelson and Jan Van Ginkel, whose advice on Philoxenus and John of Ephesus, delivered under the monsoon and accompanied by a bottle of whisky, has been very helpful. Thanks also go to Marlia Mango and Elif Keser-Kayaalp for allowing me to use their photographs in this book.
Finally, my greatest debts go to my family and to Katherine, for all of their love and kindness. I dedicate this book to you.
Notes
A Note on Places and Peoples I have used Roman names for cities throughout, except where I refer to the Islamic period. Thus I refer to Edessa, rather than Urhoy or Urfa. The distinction between Syria and Mesopotamia presents a special problem. Syriac sources often use both terms to refer to a much wider area than the Roman provinces. Syria can stretch from Gaza to Edessa, while Mesopotamia (Syriac Beth Nahryn) can refer to the region from Armenia to the Persian Gulf, as well as the smaller region around Edessa, Nisibis, and Harran. This geographical imprecision is further complicated by ethnic terminology: Suryaye or Syrians are variously defined by family origin, language, homeland, or religion. I retain these imprecise terms because they reflect the different ways that authors drew ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries, but I will also refer to more precisely demarcated Roman provinces (e.g. Syria I and IJ, Osrhoene, Phoenicia Libanensis, etc.)
A Note on Translations My translations from Latin, Greek, and Syriac make occasional departures from published translations, but these are mostly minor.
Introduction
In the year 502 the Persian shah Kavad laid siege to the city of Edessa on the Mesopotamian frontier of the Roman empire. A local chronicler, writing in Syriac and known by the name of Joshua the Stylite, reports that Kavad was defied by the Roman general Areobindus. The general told the shah: “You have seen that this city belongs neither to you, nor to Anastasius [the Roman emperor], but to Christ, who has blessed it’ In this environment of conflict between two great powers, this Edessene chronicle proclaimed the cultural independence of his city, which he connects to the legendary promise made by Christ to her pre-Roman king, Abgar the Black.’
This book will investigate the development of this cultural independence as one of the long-term consequences of the Christianisation of the Roman world. It will examine Christianisation both from the perspective of the Roman ‘state, in terms of attempts to use and subvert local religious tradition, and from a local perspective, as part of a claim to cultural independence in a world dominated by a single political system. Secondly, this book will turn to the consequences of this cultural independence for political ideas. I argue that the hagiographic writing of sixth-century Syria and Mesopotamia, drew on an earlier cultural independence to challenge the actions of the emperor. The Christological crises produced a theological rupture and persecution that prompted a more direct Kaiserkritik, a political thought that held up the actions of Christian rulers against an idealised template.
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However, before we can investigate the appearance of this cultural independence, we must first set it in two different contexts. The first of these is the broad intellectual and political context: the Roman empire of the second and third centuries and the apparatus it employed to exclude or normalise the ‘barbarian’ world around it, the paideia. The second is Edessa’s specific geographical, political and economic position within this world, the specific context for the emergence of Syriac as a Christian language and Edessa’s own foundation myths.
PART I
A Roman Paideia
The Roman empire of the second and third century halted the relentless expansion that had characterised its earlier history. In a gesture of his philhellenic sensibilities, the emperor Hadrian poured the resources of the empire into the decoration of Athens and the sponsorship of athletic games and of Greek literary works. The emperor’s gesture was more than just an appreciation of Hellenic culture. It was also an appropriation. The inscription on the emperor’s triumphal arch in Athens reads: ‘It was not Theseus who built Athens but Hadrian’*
The symbiosis of Greek and Roman culture was accompanied by an underlying competition to control the history of both Greeks and Romans, in which cultural credentials were used to jockey for prestige, the so-called Second Sophistic. But even if emperors sought to control the history of the Greek poleis for themselves, Greek literature and culture were still used and shared across the whole empire.” Mastery of this shared Greco-Roman high culture was an indication of suitable status for political activity and demonstrated access to the commonplaces and assumptions of the ruling classes, the education in a canon of classical texts referred to as paideia.
This paideia was not just a demonstration of conspicuous consumption, it was also a means of conditioning the expanding ruling class of the empire to continue to collaborate with the imperial project and to exclude those who did not belong. Education was ‘the means through which souls proceed to excellence and a condition proper to humanity’ and educators were, like soldiers and judges, defenders of what was proper, ‘of the lines between what was thinkable and unthinkable’.* Paideia was, in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, a generative habitus, that set out the valid norms of behaviour, through which the status quo might be reproduced.” Thus the educational system of Rome’s elites produced a set of shared forms for expression across all the provinces of the empire, which allowed the elites of conquered provinces to Romanise themselves: to learn the language and behaviour of a transprovincial elite and, in competition with their neighbours, to set up the institutions that would in turn teach paideia.®
But if paideia was a package for inclusion into an imperial elite, then it also included a series of stereotypes, drawn originally from Classical Greece, which excluded those who did not fit in. Thinkers in Athens in the fifth century Bc had developed philosophies about the natural slavery of barbarians, and of their effeminacy and unsuitability for government, theories that built on earlier assumptions about the stupidity of those who could not speak Greek.’ These theories were accompanied by Lamarckian notions of the effects of climate upon civilisation, meaning that the peoples furthest from Greece, the steppe nomads, were least suited to government, subsisting on raw meat and living outside civilisation, a stereotype that lasted long into antiquity.®
The Roman empire would continue to employ similar stereotypes to differentiate itself from the ‘uncivilised world’ around it and from many of the ethnic groups that it ruled. But, unlike the Hellenic writers, there was a sense that the empire could reshape and improve its environment, that it had a mandate for rule and expansion as a result of its civilising mission, which provided law and peace to the whole world.’ In Roman hands, these stereotypes had to be more flexible since they had to allow for the improvement of provincials, as we see in Plutarch’s vision of Alexander’s civilising mission or Lucian of Samosata’s vision of himself as a barbarian transformed by paideia.'®
This image of the Roman empire in the second century only allowed a small group with the power to engage in politics and engage in civic patronage. This same group of elites was defined by paideia, and, even when criticising other elites or the emperor himself, the group was bound together by this set of shared references and values. As Geertz puts it, ‘individuals, even if divided, read from a shared script of shared symbolic forms’.'’ Beyond this group, the inhabitants of different provinces, even after the universal grant of citizenship, were divided by religion, language, and culture. But there was no alternative set of cultural values to rival paideia: if Hadrian had told the Athenians that he had built their city, and thereby appropriated their history, he intended to destroy the history of the Jews when he turned Jerusalem into the Roman colonia of Aelia Capitolina and expelled them from their symbolic centre.'* For the majority of the empire’s citizens, it is the participation in the Roman army, access to the Roman law, and, to lesser extents, the imperial cult and the use of Latin and Greek, which defined membership of the Roman empire.
The Fifth Century
The gradual Christianisation of the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries changed this situation. If paideia was still prized as a display of knowledge, it was not the only means of involvement in the empire. Peter Brown’s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity has emphasised the increasing importance of bishops in high politics, as they took over the roles of the curial classes, engaged in diplomacy on behalf of their cities and drew support from the urban poor through their role as the distributors of the church’s charity.'” There are several corollaries to Brown’s argument. The urban mob was, to a degree, enfranchised by this symbiosis with episcopal power: its potential to influence the behaviour of urban elites by acclamation, which had existed in antiquity, was now strengthened by a particular spokesman. Simultaneously, the definition of the empire as a Christian empire meant that all Roman citizens ought to be orthodox Christians: any congregation might support clerics or holy men to articulate their desires on a wider arena.
Much of the historiography of the Roman empire has tended to emphasise the centripetal effects of Christianisation upon the identities of Roman citizens.’* The ecclesiastical historians of the fifth century, whom I will investigate briefly in Chapter 1, equated the selfcontrol of civilised pagan Romans with the Nicene orthodoxy of the Theodosian dynasty and attributed the piety of the ascetic holy men of the past to contemporary emperors. And, unlike earlier emperors, the orthodoxy that they demonstrated when God answered their prayers was applicable to the whole empire and the spread of their universal religion became equated with the extension of Roman power. These histories simultaneously differentiated the Theodosian dynasty from its Arian predecessors and stressed the need for contemporary Romans to remain loyal to the creed of Nicaea for their empire to prosper against barbarians and heretics. Heresiology was increasingly used alongside long-standing stereotypes about barbarians to demarcate the Roman, orthodox world, a process Maas has called ‘the barometer of Christian identification with imperial authority’.’”
Thus a much larger proportion of the empire’s subjects were now being monitored, in terms of their orthodoxy and right practice. But these subjects had also become political participants, because of the increased role of the populace in providing an orthodox mandate. This process also differentiated Jews and Samaritans, who were increasingly politically isolated but also more clearly defined groups in a Christian empire.
However, the effects of Christianisation were not limited to the extension of the boundaries of the Roman world to exclude heretics and barbarians. The self-presentation of the Roman state that is reflected in the ecclesiastical histories cannot be assumed to be a dominant discourse.'® Even in these, historians used their praise of the emperors to constrain their future actions, such as Socrates’ assertions that the rigorist Novatian sect (with which he sympathised) were also Nicenes who had opposed the Arians, and should therefore be tolerated in the Nicene empire. Moroever, as Hobsbawm has suggested, identities co-exist to be triggered in different situations.'’ Being Roman and being Christian were both supra-ethnic identities that could be blurred together or separated by political thinkers, or through legislation.
But the efforts of certain elites to equate a certain form of Christianity with certain ways of being Roman as the sole orthodox, legitimate way the empire should be run, should not blind us to the reversal of this process, in which heterodox or heteropract Christianities refused to obey the models set out for them, or when Christian cities wrote themselves new histories structured around their religion, that differentiated themselves from the contemporary Roman empire.
Thus when Averil Cameron writes of a ‘totalising discourse’ in which Christian texts and styles annexed and converted every available literary niche, we need to nuance her statement carefully.’* The fourth to sixth century clearly did see an expansion in the production of Christian texts, but this was far from homogenous in its effects. Some traditions, especially heresiology and ecclesiastical history, represent the attempts of the state and of powerful bishops to demarcate the boundaries of the state and of proper religion, to classify and to judge both Romans and non-Romans (though even here, groups of elites might strongly disagree, as we see in the rivalries between Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch). But elsewhere the discourse was thoroughly fragmented, as clerics advocated personal heresies or preserved the anti-imperial stance of the third century in their hagiography, such as when Antony criticises Constantine as ‘a mere man’ in Athanasius’ Life of Antony.’
PART II
Edessa and her Neighbours
Perhaps one of the best examples of this fragmented discourse is the profusion of Christian writing in languages other than Greek and Latin: in Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, and Coptic. In part this reflects the early history of Christianity: the religion had developed in the Roman world but opposed to it, and the Roman empire adopted a movement that already had numerous scriptural languages; independent histories of proselytism and martyrdom and a spectrum of doctrinal ideas. It is this aspect of the religion adopted by Constantine that I wish to stress especially here: for all that Christianisation does represent an extension of the powers of Roman elites to mould the definition of orthodox behaviour, some traditions were beyond their reach, and would form the basis for inventions of history and for ideas of cultural independence that were maintained while still being ‘Roman.””
The focus of this work will be on the emergence of cultural independence in a region where one of these ‘barbarian’ languages, Syriac, achieved significance. My geographical parameters therefore, not only concentrate on the scribal and intellectual centre of the Syriac language in Edessa and Mesopotamia, but also include the broader zones to the south and west of the Euphrates, as well as Sasanian-controlled lands east of the Tigris, to which it spread. This geographical breadth will allow us to investigate the genesis of Edessene inventions of history as well as its reception in other Aramaic-speaking territories where Syriac achieved a status as a prestige language, sometimes rivalling Greek.
Edessa itself was situated in Mesopotamia, a small fortified city that was one of a number of client kingdoms absorbed by the Roman empire only in the third century. Like the cities of Hatra, Harran, and Palmyra it possessed a pantheon of local pagan gods, a royal house, and an aristocracy that claimed local origins, as well as an indigenous Jewish population.*’ However, unlike the others, it was the only city of the borderlands between Rome and Persia that retained prosperity and security into the fourth century. As an important settlement near the frontier it was fortified against Persian attack and received Christian refugees from Nisibis after that city fell to the Persians in 363.
Additionally, Edessa derived prosperity from trade. The city was positioned very near the sole legitimate trade route between the Romans and Persians, whch ran through Nisibis, and this was supported by a network of roads and inns, the logistic support that made trade possible.** The city’s specialisation is recognised in its Christian foundation history, the Doctrina Addai, which remarks that its supposed author, the scribe Labubna, placed it in the archives, ‘among the laws of the kings and the contracts of the merchants’.”*
Mesopotamia’s position on the frontier with Persia meant that it received large external stimuli in the form of imperial funding for fortification, as well as water supplies which had secondary functions beyond the purely military. This external threat even prompted the creation of fortified cities, of which Amida and Constantina (Tella), under Constantius II, and Dara, under Anastasius, are the most famous.** Amida in particular acquired fame as a monastic centre, and it is celebrated for this in John of Ephesus’ Lives of the Eastern Saints.
However, in spite of this external sponsorship of other sites, Edessa retained its importance as a centre for manuscript production into the Islamic period, a cultural importance that is also reflected in Edessa’s prominence in the early parts of all historical writing in Western Syriac.”” Above all Edessa was seen, probably accurately, as the origin-point of Syriac in regions where other, less prestigious dialects of Aramaic were spoken.”°
To the south and west of the Euphrates, Aramaic was also spoken. But this was a region where formal Roman government had been in place since the first century, and where the mark of Seleucid rule may also have been stronger, with the deliberate renaming of a great part of Syria I and II after Macedonian cities. This zone to the south of Edessa can be divided in two. The maritime region, consisiting of the province of Phoenicia Libanensis and the coast of the Syrian provinces, with their great cities of Antioch and Beirut, drew their prosperity and siginificance not only from trade, but also from their longstanding importance as educational centres for the whole Roman world (especially in law and rhetoric).*’
Further to the east, and dependent on the port cities at this time for their trade in wine and olive oil, was inland Syria.** This region was studded with cities (re-)founded in the wake of Alexander’s conquests: Chalcis, Beroea, Zeugma, Cyrrhus.*” And Greek was used in an urban context as a language of administration for ‘church and state’.”” Yet, as Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ fifth-century Historia Religiosa demonstrates, the countryside, in the provinces of Euphratensis and rural Syria I and II, contained speakers of both Aramaic and Arabic. This rural territory also contained the varied religious practice that would attract both criticism and praise from its bishop, in his careful winnowing of suitable religious exemplars for the monasticism of his own day.
Palestine, even further to the south, lies mostly beyond the remit of this study, save as a comparison for how religious and cultural difference might be accommodated in the Christian Roman empire, in the case of the Jews and Samaritans. However, the Arab phylarchates that were established on the fringes of Palestine in the sixth century, as part of a reaction against Persian aggression, will provide an excursus in the final chapter.
Sasanian Mesopotamia, to the east of Edessa, will also be treated briefly. As an Aramaic-speaking region that received the missionaries and Christian myths of Edessa, it provides an important example of how Christianisation generated new ideas of history and self-awareness beyond the orthodoxies of the Roman world. On the other hand, the later missions of the Church of the East (the ‘Nestorians’), into Central Asia, India, and the Persian Gulf, lie beyond this study.
Most of the urban centres of the regions of the Roman empire that I will examine had been participants in the historical inventions that accompanied the Greco-Roman paideia. This was done chiefly by describing their foundation by the gods or heroes of pagan myth, or by connecting themselves to the real, but dimly remembered, protagonists of distant history. Thus numerous cities in Syria and Anatolia imagined that they had been founded by Athens or Sparta; Phrygia emphasised its mythic connection to Midas; Miletus to the hero Sarpedon, and Sidon to Cadmus.** This pagan historical invention continued into the fifth-century, with the stories of the foundation of Beirut by the goddess Tyche.*” This process allowed cities to jostle for prestige with their neighbours or provide excuses for old rivalries while validating their actions in terms of the paideia and its shared history.
Yet, strikingly, the developing importance of Christianity as an imperial religion also brought with it the near complete extinction of these foundational histories. A new emphasis on local saints’ cults and their relics did allow cities to emphasise their prestige in the terms of the new religion.** But this process was disconnected from the political past of the city and its foundation (real or imagined).
Only two exceptions to this stand out in the Christian Roman world. The first is the memory of Constantine and his successors, who were celebrated as the founder, not only of Constantinople, but also of other cities (such as Martyropolis/Maypherkat, Amida, and Constantina).°” Even this foundation history is the memory of a refoundation, the jettisoning of an unwanted past in favour of an improved past in the relatively recent era of Constantine. The second example, unique in the Roman East, is Edessa’s Doctrina Addai, in which its pagan past was Christianised, but still presented the memory of an independent city, where Edessa’s rulers met with an apostle.
Cultures and Ethnies
Edessa, then, was unusual in its ability to vindicate its pre-Christian past as a Christian history. This invented history formed the basis for its fifth-century cultural independence. And it was out of this sense of difference, in language, religious practice, and history, that later authors would assert the existence of Syriac-speakers as a distinct people, the Suryaye, and a history of local orthodoxy that underpinned criticism of the emperor.
In order to understand this transformation, of the accretion and association of ways of being different within the Roman world, I have found it useful to turn to writers on modern nationalism, who have faced similar questions. I do not seek to enter their debates directly, but the era of nationalism provides numerous models for the invention of nations, as a unifying dominant form of identity over and above ethnicity, class, religion, or dwelling place, but still drawing upon them. It is in this process of invention, by which different identities are clustered into a single more complex identity, that I think we can draw a parallel between eras of national formation in the modern period and the centrifugal effects of Christianisation in the late antique Roman empire.”°
Two of these theorists, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, have seen the existence of ‘nations, that is “communities of language, territory, economic life and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture’’’ as products of nationalism, and the invented histories that tie together the ‘raw materials’ of language, customs and territory.”° They conceive of this as a distinctively modern process, though Hobsbawm allows for ‘elite proto-nationalism’ that preceded the mass movements that followed the French Revolution.”
If we use the term ‘nation’ for any polity before nineteenth-century nationalism we are clearly on weaker ground than Gellner and Hobsbawm, because a theory of nationalism itself made modern thinkers formulate their own definitions. But even in a world before a shared definition of ‘the nation’ emerged, theories of the nation provide examples of how invented histories glued together language, customs and self-identity and produced new entities. Antony Smith, reacting against Gellner’s work, has suggested that nationalism tended to involve the reworking of earlier ideas and the attribution of significance to latent points of difference. Smith’s emphasis on the role of symbols, around which a nation or other group is gathered, allows him to conceive of nation as recurrent, continuous or rediscovered.*” These symbols might be the myths, language or customs shared by a people or physical characteristics that function as recognisable signs of group membership. He terms this blend of myths and symbols in polities before mass movement ‘ethnies,, a term we will define more closely later.
Adrian Hastings provides two specific suggestions for the role of Christianity in this process of invention in the pre-modern period. Firstly, his evocation of the Pentecost story as a model for national difference based upon language is interesting because it is used in multiple different forms in late antiquity as a model both for a Christian empire ruling over many language groups and for the idea that each community, defined by its language, should have its own apostle.** And Sava in Serbia, Patrick in Ireland (or, for our period, Gregory in Armenia and Addai in Edessa) provide good examples of how a national dynasty and a national myth might crystallise, especially in the hands of an indigenous clergy, around such apostolic founders.*”
Secondly, Hastings also points to the importance of vernacular liturgy and the translation of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation as important initial stages for the development of nations in northern Europe. This suggestion brings out a parallel between religious revivals and reformation in Europe, America, and Africa and late antique Christianisation, especially since the eastern Roman empire employed vernacular liturgies long before Protestantism.*” This idea has been developed more fully in Gorski’s study of the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain. He emphasises that the Hebraic nationalism of the revolt, referring to the Dutch as ‘God’s people’ and William I as a David, defending Leiden against the Assyrian Spaniards, which was reflected within the Dutch ‘print community.** This propaganda formed the basis for calls to exclude non-Calvinists from ‘the new Israel’, and inspired similar “Hebraic moments’ in Lutheran Hesse and Protestant England, creating a paradigm for the formation of multiple Protestant communities.
Religious distinctions provided a potential boundary between groups in late antiquity, one of a number of such boundaries that was asserted through the invention of history. One of the persuasive aspects of Smith’s model is that it recognises that the differences between people that, only in some circumstances, trigger formation of a nation or other kind of group. Importantly, it recognises that individuals who make choices based on one groups identity rather than another do not do so in other circumstances.”° Essentially, individuals’ identities can be passive and are triggered in certain situations.
There are two corollaries for such group formation that are important for our purposes. The first is that the leaders of a group can determine what kinds of behaviour are appropriate for a ‘good Jew’ or ‘a good Malay. An example of this is provided in Shamsul’s writing on Malay nationalism. He points to the polemical identification of Malay characteristics by the different political parties of an independent Malaya. These factors, such as loyalty to the rajahs, Islamic practice or culture, dwelling-place, descent and language, did not only differentiate Malays from Chinese and Indian immigrants, but also set out a pattern for what made a ‘good’ Malay; the extent to which Malay ethnicity should be equated with Malaysian nationality, and established the criteria on which one might claim to be Malay. The process of signification, in which ‘objects, features and processes acquire meaning’, empowered those in control of political rhetoric to define the terms of being Malay and to superimpose it on previously much more fluid notions of Malayness that date back to the early modern period.””
The second consequence of group formation is that, over time, it becomes harder to switch groups or for individuals to assert alternative identities. The anthropologist Frederic Barth, suggested that ethnicity could be seen as a performance, whose rules could be set to benefit elites within that group as well to preserve the identity of the group by constructing boundaries against others, to whom its rules were alien and hard to learn. For Barth, ethnic groups are constantly being constructed by a generative process of boundary formation. These boundaries are ascribed on the basis of overt signs, such as dress, language and building styles, and of value orientations, the system by which an individual judges others and is judged.**
The formation of myths and symbols and their roles in moulding and triggering the differences between peoples that generate identity is a methodology that seems applicable to late antiquity. Smith suggests ‘ethnie’ as a term for a community that is not a nation, a term that combines a sense of self-definition, shared myths (especially a myth of shared descent), uniform public culture, a territory, and legal standardisation, while lacking the mass participation, nationalist ideology, and membership of an international community that he sees as distinctive of the ‘nation’.”” I will adopt Smith’s definition here, except to note that, to my mind, an ethnie is like a nation in that it gathers numerous forms of self-definition and presents them as a single form, creating myths to merge multiple forms of self-classification.’ Ethnies, like nations, are inventions that use already available symbolic material. It is this process that we can observe in the texts surrounding the Doctrina Addai in fifth-century Mesopotamia, where different texts, focused on different locations and strata of society, argue for shared language, kinship, territory, doctrinal beliefs, and ascetic practices that bind together an Edessene or Suryaya ethnie.
PART III: SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
Cutural Independence in Syria and Edessa
The first half of this book considers the existence of distinctive religious practice and language in Syria and the use of these by different kinds of elite writers. Chapter 1 sets out the centripetal tendencies of the Christianisation of the empire, with its emphasis on the self-control of the Nicene emperors. It is this focus on the victory of Nicaea and the opposition to the Arians that guaranteed the importance of oriental Christian groups whose members had opposed the Arians, in a political model that justified the rule of a Nicene emperor. In fourth-century Christianity, the impeccable credentials of individuals such as Jacob of Nisibis and Ephraem as Nicenes made them fathers of the church, and any interventions in the way Christianity was followed in Syria would have to negotiate with their legacy. Because Syriac had become a widespread missionary language, closely associated with Christianity, and because major proponents of Nicaea had written in Syriac meant that the language escaped the fate of the languages of Anatolia, where Christianisation accelerated Hellenisation.
Chapter 2 examines how the prestigious but distinct religious traditions associated with these Syriac-speaking fathers of the church were treated in a fifth-century hagiographic collection, Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ Historia Religiosa. In it, Theodoret accepts the orthodox reputations of Nicene figures of the past from near Edessa and Nisibis while removing their more flamboyant ascetical behaviour. These figures are important as monastic founders for the provinces of Euphratensis and Syria I and II, but he is careful to shift his hagiography away from more suspicious ascetics who were accused of heresy and away from Mesopotamia to the north. By removing some ascetics, and subverting the reputations of others, Theodoret’s collection shows us both how important these ‘barbarian’ saints had become, as well as the techniques a hagiographer could employ to transform their reputations and make them acceptable exemplars for his readers.
Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the different situation taken further north, in Edessa and Mesopotamia. At the same time that Theodoret was subverting the reputations of some Mesopotamian ascetics, a mythical foundation history of the city of Edessa was being compiled by a scribe working for native aristocrats, the Doctrina Addai. It describes how Abgar, an early king of Edessa, corresponded with Jesus and how he welcomed the missionary Addai to the city, who set down the ideals of orthodox Christianity and established these aristocrats, the bnay hire, as their guardians. This legend indicates a kind of cultural independence that was fuelled by Christianity. The increased status of Syriac in the Christian era, as the language through which much of the Aramaic-speaking had been proselytised, and the records of the third-century kings of Edessa, provided the background for the invention of history that we see in the Doctrina Addai. Here I consider the role of Edessene cultural independence within the Roman empire, and how Christianisation prompted inventions of history and assertions of prestige at a level below the doctrinal squabbles and accusations of heresy that divided Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople.
Importantly, I do not intend to use these legends to investigate the pasts they purport to describe, a period between the first and third centuries, but instead to ask what they tell us about the societies that created them in the fifth and sixth centuries. While Syriac produced no formal political philosophy in the mould of an Aristotle or a Cicero, I argue that these myths do represent a certain kind of political thought, by which Edessa, and later other places in Mesopotamia, distinguished themselves from the Roman empire and, by the sixth century, placed conditions on imperial rule that established certain rights of resistance.
The Sixth Century: Syria, Mesopotamia and the Miaphysite Movement
The second part of the book considers how these foundation myths and this fifth century cultural independence evolved further in the sixth century, when many, though not all, of the sees of the Roman provinces of Syria, Meospotamia, and Osrhoene subscribed to the Miaphysite formula during the Christological controversies. (Here I use the term Miaphysite to describe the non-Chalcedonian churches in communion with Severus in preference to Monophysite, a polemical and inaccurate term found in the older literature.)”*
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the connections that existed between Miaphysite writers in Syriac and the foundation myths that had been written in Edessa in the fifth century. This connection is a major omission of Segal’s Edessa: the Blessed City, in which his concentration on periods when the city was politically independent obscures its importance within the Roman empire.
I concentrate on this connection in Chapter 5, The Julian Romance, when I examine an anonymous sixth century mythical history that describes the emperor Justinian in terms of the pagan emperor Julian and the Chalcedonians in terms of the Jews. The older boundaries of Christian Edessa, by which it had declared itself one of the great cities of the Christian empire, were now turned against the emperor and his Christology: cultural independence was now played out on a broader tapestry of the whole empire, when the city’s Christian past was favourably compared to the support for paganism and Judaism in Constantinople and Antioch, which were seen as forerunners of later Chalcedonianism. If sixth-century Constantinople was meant to be ‘the epitome of earthly power and the model of the divine’ by its creators, then this Edessene author clearly thought that his city, given to Christ by Constantine, was superior.”*
I continue this investigation of the continuities between fifthcentury cultural independence and the displacement of imperial authority in John of Ephesus’ Lives of the Eastern Saints. These lives continue the polemic of the Julian Romance in a more open manner. The Miaphysites are seen as the inheritors of an ascetic history that stretches back to the martyrs of the third century and the polemical language that had been used to criticise the Arians in the fifthcentury church histories is turned against the Chalcedonian emperor Justinian. John also stresses the continuity of ‘indigenous’ Mesopotamian practices because it is a constituent part of his construction of a distinctive territory, ‘the East’, centred on Amida and Edessa.
However, an appeal to John’s use of a timeless Syriac spirituality is out of place here.” John is not another exemplar of a changeless Syriac Christianity. Instead, he is selective in his examples of asceticism and is wary of the criticism extreme asceticism could attract. John’s assertions of continuity with ancient orthodoxy proclaim both the distinctiveness of his territory and its ‘natural’ inclination towards Miaphysitism as an eternal orthodoxy that was used to fight the better-funded Chalcedonians. By emphasising the money of the Chalcedonians and, in one instance, their protection of the Jews, he tapped into a strand of political thought that runs through the Doctrina Addai and the Julian Romance that sought an orthodox Christian state, bound by ties of charity and purged of Jews.
The Miaphysite political thought that I see developing out of earlier ideas of cultural independence does not propose any alternative to Roman rule, but it does displace the attributes of the emperor, as the guardian of the Christians and preserver of orthodoxy, onto local holy men and non-Christian rulers.
Within the Roman empire, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity involved the appropriation an important status column that idealised ascetic conduct, self-sacrifice and piety.*° The fifth-century ecclesiastical historians portray this ideal in their victorious orthodox emperors, scattering their enemies through prayer. But this combination also left emperors open to criticism if they failed in these ideals and in the Miaphysite texts of the sixth century we see the emperor being displaced from the status column that looked up to ascetic
In the final chapter I examine who these others might be. John of Ephesus’ history and the multiple accounts that were produced in the aftermath of the massacres of Christians at Najran provide two such examples: the kings of Axum and the rulers of the Ghassanid Arabs. I argue that the imperial ideas of a Christian Roman empire, the precursor to the Byzantine Commonwealth that Obolensky found in state-centred sources of the later empire, were manipulated by both Miaphysite leaders and non-Roman kings. The monopoly of the Roman emperors as sole Christian rulers was broken in this development of Miaphysite political thought, in which an international Miaphysite community that straddled many states and empires sought protectors and adjudicators for its internal schisms. Chapter 7 examines this situation, at the end of the sixth century, when a Miaphysite community, without ever providing any alternative to Roman rule, began to displace its expectations for protection and adjudication to local holy men or to non-Christian rulers.
By placing parts of the Syriac literature of the fifth and sixth centuries into its political context, in and alongside the Roman empire, I will examine the emergence of different conceptions of a Suryaya people, that shared a language and foundation myths and, to varying degrees, a shared territory and religion. Therefore this investigation of the invention of identity in the aftermath of the spread of Christianity and its subsequent divisions sees cultural production in the eastern Mediterranean as an essentially political activity.
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